Domestic Surveillance

Christopher Calabrese and Matthew Harwood write at Tomdispatch.com For at least the last six years, government agents have been exploiting an AT&T database filled with the records of billions of American phone calls from as far back as 1987. The rationale behind this dragnet intrusion, codenamed Hemisphere, is to find suspicious links between people with […]

How the National Security State creates its own Whistleblowers, with a Letter to the Next One (Engelhardt)

Juan Cole

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com Dear Whistleblower, I don’t know who you are or what you do or how old you may be. I just know that you exist somewhere in our future as surely as does tomorrow or next year. You may be young and computer-savvy or a career federal employee well along in […]

censorship

Johns Hopkins University Orders Cryptography Professor’s Blog Posting Removed for Classified NSA Links (Larson & Elliott)

Juan Cole

Jeff Larson and Justin Elliott write at ProPublica Citing concerns about linking to classified material, Johns Hopkins University asked a professor this morning to remove a blog post discussing last week’s revelations about the NSA’s efforts to break encryption. The post had linked to government documents published by ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times. […]

Domestic Surveillance

Top 13 Surveillance Secrets the Gov’t Doesn’t want You to Know About (Quigley)

Juan Cole

Bill Quigley writes at Commondreams.org “We believe most Americans would be stunned to learn the details of how these secret court opinions have interpreted…the Patriot Act. As we see it, there is now a significant gap between what most Americans think the law allows and what the government secretly claims the law allows. This is […]

Domestic Surveillance

NSA abuses include Stalking ex-Girlfriends

Juan Cole

We have HUMINT, or human intelligence gathered from agents. We have SIGINT or signals intelligence. And now we have LOVEINT or NSA analysts occasionally reading the emails of ex-lovers. It doesn’t happen a lot, the NSA told the WSJ, but often enough that there is a word for it. The NSA only admitted this abuse […]

Domestic Surveillance

Obama wants all the info in your Smart Phone without a Warrant (Lazare)

Juan Cole

Sarah Lazare writes at Commondreams.org Amid ongoing controversy over NSA warrantless spying programs, another legal battle exposes the Obama administration’s willingness to steamroll civil liberties in the name of “security.” Last week, the Obama administration urged the U.S. Supreme Court to issue a precedent-setting ruling that the 4th amendment—which prohibits unreasonable and warrantless searches and […]

Afghanistan

Bradley Manning in a World of Cheneys, Hadithas, and NSA Domestic Surveillance

Juan Cole

The sentencing of Bradley Manning to 35 years in prison came because he leaked government documents, mostly with a low level of classification that probably shouldn’t have been classified in the first place. Some of the leaked documents showed the US government or other governments behaving badly, in ways the American people had a right […]

censorship

Greenwald Partner falsely detained as Terrorist: How to Create a Dictatorship

Juan Cole

How to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps: 1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year. 2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret 3. Create a class […]

censorship

Levison of Lavabits on FBI gag order: “There’s information I can’t share with my lawyer”

Juan Cole

Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” gets an exclusive interview with Ladar Levison, who closed down his Lavabit encrypted email service rather than comply with Federal demands that he allow it to be monitored. Levison’s plight, whereby he was ordered to do something against his conscience without a warrant and then placed under a gag order not […]